Patent Issued for Composite Shoe Upper and Method of Making Same

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Journal of Engineering -- NIKE, Inc. (Beaverton, OR) has been issued patent number 8321984, according to news reporting originating out of Alexandria, Virginia, by VerticalNews editors.

The patent's inventors are Dojan, Frederick J. (Vancouver, WA); Johnson, Daniel Akey (Taichung, TW); Tseng, Yung-Tsung (Toulio, TW); Kohatsu, Shane S. (Portland, OR).

This patent was filed on October 21, 2009 and was cleared and issued on December 4, 2012.

From the background information supplied by the inventors, news correspondents obtained the following quote: "The design of many types of footwear is often driven by conflicting considerations. As but one example, it is normally desirable for an athletic shoe to have a construction that supports and protects a wearer's foot during a particular athletic endeavor. However, 'breathability' is also a desirable quality for many types of athletic shoes. Specifically, air flow from the outside to a shoe interior can help relieve the effects of heat and perspiration that typically build up around a foot during sporting activities. Unfortunately, many materials that provide good support and foot protection can block air and moisture flow. Conversely, many materials that facilitate air and moisture flow provide little support or protection to the wearer's foot.

"One solution is to fabricate a shoe in which some portions are formed from supportive/protective materials and some portions are formed from breathable materials. However, this can increase the complexity of the fabrication process and increase cost. Moreover, footwear design (including athletic footwear design) is also driven by aesthetics. A complex production process developed to fabricate a complex shoe can potentially limit a manufacturer's ability to vary that shoe's design to achieve different aesthetic effects."

Supplementing the background information on this patent, VerticalNews reporters also obtained the inventors' summary information for this patent: "This Summary is provided to introduce a selection of concepts in a simplified form that are further described below in the Detailed Description. This Summary is not intended to identify key features or essential features of the invention.

"In at least some embodiments, a shoe has an upper that includes a bonded mesh composite panel. The panel includes a substrate layer formed from synthetic leather or another material chosen to provide support and protection to the foot of a wearer, but that can include ventilation openings. The panel further includes a mesh layer that is bonded to the substrate layer and spans one or more of the ventilation openings. One or more panels of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) or other desired material can also be included in certain regions so as to create skin layers that provide abrasion protection for the mesh layer and/or to achieve different aesthetic effects.

"A bonded mesh composite panel for an upper is in some embodiments fabricated by first arranging panels of substrate, mesh and skin layer materials into an assembly corresponding to the locations of those panels in a completed upper. The assembly may also include separate layers of hot melt bonding material interposed between the substrate, mesh and skin layers, and/or a bonding material may be a component of a substrate, mesh and/or skin layer material. The assembly is then pressed at an elevated temperature so as to melt the bonding material and the skin layers and bond the elements together. Before the pressed assembly completely cools, it is pressed a second time in an unheated press. A heat-conductive compressible pad can be used in the pressing process to create a surface effect in the skin layers that reveals a pattern of an underlying mesh layer."

For the URL and additional information on this patent, see: Dojan, Frederick J.; Johnson, Daniel Akey; Tseng, Yung-Tsung; Kohatsu, Shane S.. Composite Shoe Upper and Method of Making Same. U.S. Patent Number 8321984, filed October 21, 2009, and issued December 4, 2012. Patent URL: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=118&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=5881&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=20121204.PD.&OS=ISD/20121204&RS=ISD/20121204

Keywords for this news article include: NIKE Inc.

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